TMU Pooling in NV40?

DaveB presented the following in his NV40 preview:
In our discussions, David Kirk suggested that the texture units on NV40 will operate not at the pixel level, but at the quad level, such that if it was determined that the texture sampling requirements of the entire quad were less than the overall sampling abilities of the quad of texture units then potentially trilinear sampling may be achievable in a single cycle over the entire quad, where two cycles would be required with each texture sampler fixed to a pipeline.
We asked Emmett if this was the case with NV40 and he replied that "some in the NV4x range would feature this as it has benefits and drawbacks."
Emmit mentioned some drawbacks. What would be those drawbacks? Anyone find out if this is the case for NV40?
 
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